The Army’s coup in Egypt: for the people or against the people?

The Muslim Brotherhood’s atrocious record in government has obscured the nature of the army’s
coup, directed against the
Egyptian people and the revolutionary potential of their deep
disaffection with the old regime. As for the
remnants of that regime –
these elites are playing a game in which
instability is a vital ingredient.

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- The Muslim Brotherhood’s atrocious record
in government means most debate has focused on whether the army acted
legitimately and at the people’s behest.

- This debate misses the point that the
army’s actions were indeed a coup, but a coup directed against the Egyptian
people itself and the revolutionary potential of their deep disaffection with
the old regime and its policies.

- It also assumes the remnants of the old
regime have an interest in Egypt’s stability, while those elites seem to be playing
a game of chicken with the country’s future – a game for which instability is a
vital ingredient.

The
Brotherhood: poor in opposition, terrible in government

In power, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was an
unmitigated disaster. Mohammed Morsi was elected by the skin of his teeth, and
only with the votes of a good slice revolutionary public opinion, who thought
that however bad he might be, the prospect of his presidency couldn’t be as
full of foreboding as that of Shafiq.

But Morsi revealed himself to be colossally
incompetent, increasingly authoritarian, and utterly unable to come up with a
plan for the economy, for political reform, for new legislation on key areas
like the media, unions or NGOs, let alone for the reform of corrupt state
institutions like the security forces.

The only tactics the Brotherhood seemed to have
in its arsenal were taken straight out of the Mubarak rulebook. The only
strategy it seemed capable of conceiving in government was to occupy all the
institutions of the state in order to prevent any other group from returning it
to opposition. Its utter inability to approach anything like a plan to fulfil
popular demands for social justice, at least, should not have been surprising, given
how closely its economic policies – dominated by its ‘pious bourgeoisie’ of
businessmen – resemble that of the old regime.

Morsi’s not-so-creeping authoritarianism was in
your face, and alienated virtually every political counterpart in Egypt. He handpicked
a prosecutor-general in an attempt to neutralise the judiciary, rammed through
a partisan (and poorly written) Constitution, played with the fire of
sectarianism, and passed a constitutional decree conferring on himself powers
so vast they probably made Mubarak blush. He marginalised or ignored any
political voice not supporting the Brotherhood, and actively tried to
neutralise any opposition, targeting political groups, the media, civil
society, and independent trade unions.

In fairness, Morsi certainly faced enormous
opposition from within the state apparatus, not just from the security sector –
with which he thought he’d successfully struck a ‘non-interference’ pact – but
also the judiciary and state bureaucracy. But the Brotherhood signally failed
to build coalitions against such established centres of power, making it unlikely
that the Brotherhood’s strategies would have been much different without such
opposition from former regime apparatchiks.

Democracy
and popular will

This context is necessary to start grasping the
depth and breadth of popular opposition to Morsi. This popular mobilisation
cannot be dismissed by stigmatising it as being politically or socially
partisan: opposition has come from a range of quarters, from secularists to
Islamists, socialists to liberals – Morsi’s political talent turns out to have
been alienating opponents and potential allies. The Tamarrod (Rebel) campaign
which claims to have gathered over 22 million signatures calling for Morsi to
go was only the latest and most spectacular manifestation: even all the way
back to his ultimately successful presidential campaign, Morsi’s support was
not assured even amongst his natural constituencies and in the Brotherhood’s stronghold:
in Alexandria, Morsi lost in the first round to both leftist nationalist
Hamdeen Sabbahi and moderate Abdul Moneim Aboul Futouh.

The crowds protesting against Morsi around the
country were unprecedented, and even if they did not reach 40 million (50% of
the population), they compared favourably to the masses that turned out during
the 2011 January Uprising.

There must be no mistake that these
demonstrations represented the most serious challenge conceivable to Morsi’s
presidency, to the Brotherhood’s role as the country’s largest political force.
Nor can there be a question that in a democracy the purpose of formal processes
is to convey popular will: appealing to such formalities to usurp or ignore
that will is a challenge straight to the heart of democracy. Neither the
Brotherhood nor the western governments that had begun to make their peace with
it can shirk this.

When
is a coup not a coup?

However, going against such formal procedures
cannot be taken lightly, particularly when the Presidency was the office of
state with the greatest claim to legitimacy, the lower house of parliament
having been dissolved by the judiciary, and the upper house being elected on a
paltry 8% turnout. Anti-Brotherhood protesters claimed that Tamarrod’s
groundswell of popular opinion was enough to delegitimise Morsi, and that
therefore the army’s removal was legitimate, and even democratic, in that it
acted on behalf of the people. The army gladly echoed this rhetoric,
emphasising Morsi’s obvious unwillingness to compromise.

On the one hand, it is possible to make such a
case. Legitimacy can derive from essentially two contrasting sources. One is
formal, based on institutional and procedural legitimacy, the legitimacy of
constituted power. The other derives
from the clear manifestation of popular will, a manifestation of constitutive power – after all, institutional
legitimacy depends ultimately on popular consent. Leaving aside the well-known
and genuinely thorny problem whether one should take precedence over the other,
and ignoring for a moment the size of pro-Brotherhood crowds, arguably popular
demonstrations might provide the grounds to claim that while Morsi may have
been legitimate in the first sense, he was not in the second, and that
therefore the army had grounds to act
legitimately in the name of popular will.

In whose interest is a preventable spiral in violence? Demotix/Ester Meerman. All rights reserved.

However, there is simply no evidence that the
armed forces intervened somehow on behalf of “the people’s” will, as opposed to
merely attempting to legitimise its
actions this way.

History cautions against claiming that the
Egyptian upper echelons of the armed forces are willing to act in the popular
interest or even to respect civilian oversight at all. On the contrary, the one
thing the Egyptian armed forces’ leadership have tried to do since Mubarak’s
removal has been to preserve their insulation
from that popular will which civilian oversight enshrines.

This was precisely why protests against them in
2011/12 were so vehement: the Army’s leadership at that time clearly had no
plan save to ride out the storm of popular protest and attempt to secure its
‘red lines’, particularly legal immunity and control over its budget and
financial empire. Its failure was only marginally less spectacular than Morsi’s.
Indeed, the very roadmap for transition the Brotherhood is (rightly) accused of
failing to implement was the same that the Army itself failed to follow through
on.

To avoid pre-empting history, one could claim
that although the coup might have been undemocratic, its outcomes might yet be
democratic, and that the sheer pressure of a new wave of massive protests will
keep the army true. Experience would suggest scepticism, but the Egyptian
people have surprised the world before, and for their sake and everyone else’s,
we must hope that they will do so again.

Who
benefits from Egypt’s deepening political polarisation?

This debate, while important, misses a crucial
point which must be included in any analysis: it assumes that the army’s
leadership – and the rest of the Mubarak-era state apparatus – have an interest
in restoring Egypt’s stability. This is far from clear.

Egypt’s political landscape is in tatters. The
now-former president is detained incommunicado, Brotherhood leaders have been
arrested on vague charges, as have journalists and political activists, and
there is the serious risk that the army’s actions and Tamarrod’s support for
them are finally proving to a generation of Islamists the hollowness of
democracy.

But more important still is the army’s role in
the violence. The army intervened claiming it wished to prevent a descent into
civil war, and yet violence has only escalated since its intervention. It not
only failed to secure protests and prevent clashes between rival camps, but
faces mounting evidence of actively stoking conflict, for example by firing
upon pro-Morsi protesters or by allowing pro- and anti-Brotherhood
demonstrators to clash. This apparently contradictory behaviour – the army
first took over and then appeared to leave the streets, allowing clashes to
take place – begs the question: what is
the function of a (preventable) spiral in political violence in Egypt today?
It is difficult to conclude that it benefits anyone other than the military and
the regime of which it is still part.

Stirring up conflict as a tactic of political
control is not new. Mubarak leveraged Coptic/Muslim tensions, and Morsi
ratcheted those up, and stoked Sunni/Shia tensions. The question is what effect
this tactic has. The effect has been to polarise Egyptian politics between
supporters and opponents of the Brotherhood. In turn, this reduces the chances
of forming a broad coalition amongst the old/new regime, pushing the
pro-democratic opposition – which remains highly fractious, the Tamarrod
campaign notwithstanding – away from the tentative embrace with the
shakily-democratic Brotherhood or portions thereof, and straight into the
waiting arms of the certainly-undemocratic felool.

And yet, what mobilised people during the 2011
uprising and since then, was not the call for the downfall of individual
portions of the regime – Mubarak, the Police or the Army, or even corrupt
business elites – but of the nizam,
the entire system itself. Protesters were right to feel that Egypt had changed
and protesters would not simply allow things to go back to the way they were
under Mubarak.

In this sense, the unprecedented groundswell of
popular support that the Tamarrod campaign has generated was in itself the most
significant novelty facing the old/new regime, and there could be no higher
goal for that regime than pre-empting its revolutionary potential. It is
difficult to overemphasise just what a galvanising effect the Tamarrod campaign
has had: until very recently, pro-democracy activists were thoroughly
disheartened, but the unprecedented success of this campaign has given a new
impetus to popular demands, taking the initiative away from efforts at top-down
‘reform’ and ‘guided transition’.

From this point if view, the coup and the
‘legitimacy debate’ have become a trap and a distraction for the Egyptian
people, in that their greatest effect has been to distract collective attention
from issues of bread, freedom and social
justice, engage in factional fighting, and make a cohesive front between
genuinely democratic Islamist, leftist, nationalist and liberal forces far more
arduous.

Furthermore, this factionalism itself has made
the armed forces again appear indispensable to Egypt’s future, when barely a
year ago they were seen as the greatest obstacle to that future.

Ongoing low-level conflict serves this purpose
well. The elites risk overplaying their hand, however, as the Egyptian
population is increasingly mobilised, and certain portions of the old/new
regime – such as the Army’s middle ranks – might be less cohesive than
expected.

Nonetheless, part of Egypt’s elite is playing a
dangerous game of chicken not just with the opposition or the Brotherhood, but
with the country itself – a game they feel they have little chance of losing.
But this calculus might yet be mistaken: given the precedents set since January
2011, one can only wonder what the outcome will be.

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